There is an odd dichotomy in human exploration: While we think nothing of going up — jetting through the skies six miles up, skydiving from the edge of space, or launching humans hundreds or thousands of miles into deep space — going down has always proven rather difficult. To this day, the deepest humankind has ever gone is just 7.6 miles below our feet. It’s not that we don’t want to go deeper but, try as we might, despite millennia of developing advanced tools and materials, and exploration that has taken spacecraft to the edge of the Solar System, the subterranean depths remain firmly off-limits. Why?

A new space company called Deep Space Industries will be making a live broadcast later today to announce its plans to begin asteroid prospecting operations by 2015. They will be launching a fleet of mini spacecraft into solar orbit to identify potential targets near to the earth that would be suitable to mine.

Feast your eyes upon the most detailed photos of Earth by night, as seen by NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite. Marvel as the entirety of human civilization — everyone you know, everyone you love, every human being who has ever lived — is captured in a single, vulnerable image of the Black Marble.

Two days ago, Curiosity stopped to analyze a football-size piece of Martian basalt called Jake Matijevic. Not only did Curiosity analyze the rock’s structure and chemical makeup using itsChemCam spectroscopic laser, but it also used its Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) for the first time, and also took the first ultra-close-up photos using the MAHLI camera. The rock was primarily chosen to see if the results from APXS match up with ChemCam.

Is humanity close to making interstellar spaceflight a possibility, even within some of our own lifetimes? It certainly seems so as new breakthroughs in warp drive designs warrant further investigation.

Stranded 250 million miles away from Earth with no one for company except a few other rusty rovers and some orbiting satellites, Curiosity has decided to pass the time by… checking herself out. With an arsenal of no less than 17 cameras attached to various appendages, can you really blame her?